Mo Farah's coach Alberto Salazar has been backed by the man who approved the British double Olympic champion’s move to train in the United States.

Salazar has found himself at the centre of a doping storm after a BBC documentary alleged he had given Galen Rupp, one of Farah’s training partners at the Nike Oregon Project, with performance enhancing drugs for more than a decade.

But Ian Stewart, the former head of endurance at UK Athletics who encouraged Farah to move to the USA in February 2011, has backed Salazar over his links to Mary Decker-Slaney, the American middle distance runner who failed a drugs test for a urine sample in 1996.

Alberto Salazar has been backed by Ian Stewart, the former head of endurance at UK Athletics

Witnesses told the BBC's Panorama that Salazar provided Galen Rupp (left) with testosterone from age of 16

Stewart said: ‘All I know is that Alberto Salazar never coached Mary Decker-Slaney, I know that for a fact, he never did.’

Salazar is expected to use testimony from Decker-Slaney that he wasn’t coaching her when she tested positive for testosterone at the US Olympic trials in 1996 as part of his dossier of evidence refuting the allegations against him.

This is despite pictures of the pair together at athletics meetings around that time and a newspaper report from a month earlier identifying him as her coach.

Stewart encouraged British double Olympic champion Mo Farah to move to the USA in February 2011